


What Cannot Be Taken From Us

by bibliomaniac



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, but it's. mostly nice, i mean they do all sort of die in canon, if minor character death still gets your goat don't read, it does reference how keats died though so, it sort of ends with a bit of angst by necessity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 08:24:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14209107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliomaniac/pseuds/bibliomaniac
Summary: Lydia and Edward will always remember everything leading up to them becoming liches. They will always remember Keats.(aka a sort-of-fluffy-sort-of-melancholy scene from Lydia, Edward, and Keats' childhood)





	What Cannot Be Taken From Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ToTillAGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToTillAGarden/gifts).



> happy birthday eden! hopefully this makes up a bit for the big hit LOL.

Becoming a lich takes a lot of things from you—your body, your ability to interact nonmagically with this plane, your enjoyment of strawberries. But it doesn’t take your memories, and thus it is when Lydia and Edward stare at a spot out in the middle of the Felicity Wilds and then look at each other, and as their forms fuzz out and reform around their matching grins, they know they’re both remembering the exact same thing. 

Many, many years before, enough that they’ve stopped counting the number, Edward and Lydia are not liches. They’re elves, and they are young, and they are three instead of two, then.

Edward and Lydia have grown up having to forage for themselves since they could remember. Abandoned long ago by any people or institutions who might have cared for them, they make up for it by caring for each other, almost aggressively so. They are each other’s partners in crime, best friends, more one soul than two; it’s the sort of closeness that comes from needing to rely on each other to survive. 

Keats hasn’t been with them for as long. He’s human, and only twelve. They found him stealing from their secret food stash, and with one exchanged look, without needing to say anything, Lydia and Edward had agreed to take him under their wing, so to speak. Show him the ropes. (For example—if you’re going to steal, don’t eat the food at the scene of the crime. Basic.) It’s only been four years since then, but he’s already an integral part of their little unit, and it’s another thing that doesn’t need to be said that they would both, without a doubt, do whatever it took to protect him. Absolutely. Up to and including giving their lives.

(And they would, and he would be gone anyway, but that’s not yet.)

Now, they are running from the militia. Keats had his eye on something in the marketplace, and he’s not quite as light-fingered as Lydia and Edward, yet, and this shopkeeper had a magical ward set up besides, so the minute an alarm had blared, Edward had hoisted Keats back up on his back and they had taken off, zigzagging through the crowds in a practiced and disorienting weave.

“Come the fuck on, Keats,” Edward yells behind him, breath coming easily. This is far from the first time they’ve done this. It’s almost amusing the militia still think they can catch them at this point. They should really give up. “We’ve told you a thousand times, the more expensive products usually have wards—”

“I know,” Keats says, voice not quite wobbling, but close. “But it was—” 

“It was what?” Lydia asks, vaulting over an unsuspecting man kneeling by his stall and snickering when he lets out an undignified yelp.

It’s definitely a wobble now. “It was this really pretty purple necklace, and Lydia said she didn’t have anything pretty to wear—”

Lydia and Edward exchange softening glances. “Aw, Keats,” Lydia says, jerking her head to the right in a familiar gesture to split up and meet at their traditional regrouping point. “That’s very sweet.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, sad and soft in a way that got trained out of them a long time ago, and Edward flashes a grin that he knows Keats can see. 

“It’s fine, Keatty-kat.” A dumb nickname, but it makes Keats smile. “You’re a good kid.”

Lydia peels off left, and Edward goes right, hitching Keats higher on his back. From far away, he hears Lydia making a noise of soft surprise, and he’ll later blame that for why he slips up. He heads down an alleyway that he knows leads to a dead end, and they recently made the wall here higher. He curses, looking around desperately for an out, and it’s Lydia who darts past them and pulls them through a door into a dark room. 

“What the fuck,” she hisses quietly, “You never make a wrong turn—”

“You sounded like you were hurt—”

“No—just caught my leg on something, fuck, is Keats okay?”

Keats is crying quietly on Edward’s back, murmuring something like “I’m sorry,” and Lydia reaches out in the darkness to pat him reassuringly.

“It’s fine, kiddo, they didn’t spot us ducking in here and I put up a few wards. I think this place is pretty abandoned most the time, so we should be okay for an hour or so, anyway.” Lydia looks around, dark vision granting her a slightly-fuzzy grayscale view of the surroundings, then nods and whispers a cantrip that sends a ball of light out into the middle of the room.

They all blink at what they see, which is a bunch of clothes.

“Huh,” Edward says after a moment, kneeling to the ground so Keats can get off, checking him quickly for injuries and swiping at some of his tears, then looking around the room with renewed interest.

There are a bunch of mannequins wearing the clothes, done up in gaudy colors and outlandish, expensive-looking fabrics—silk and velvet and other stuff they don’t even have the names for. Lydia walks towards one of them speculatively, checking it for wards before shrugging and dragging a finger against the sleeve.

“Nice. What the hell is this, d’you think, Dodo?”

Edward walks to a pantsuit in a vibrant red and gold and takes the shoulder between index and thumb, whistling appreciatively. “I don’t know, but it’s fresh as _hell,_ right, Didi?”

Keats, who has stopped sniffling, pipes up, “I heard the vendor talking about a fashion show in a few weeks. Buncha rich folks coming into Neverwinter to see fancy clothes, I guess.” 

“Huh.” Lydia examines the mannequin, then throws a devious grin at Edward. “Doesn’t seem fair only the rich folks get to wear fancy clothes, huh?”

He slowly grins back. “Yeah, you’re _so_ right, Lydia. Doesn’t seem fair at all.”

They don’t have to ask if they’re thinking the same thing. They usually are.

They both go for the clothes at once, stripping with the kind of lack of self-consciousness that comes from living on the streets together for years. Lydia pulls on the bodysuit, made of a garish sparkly pink and outfitted with a completely unnecessary half cape on the back, while Edward steps into the pantsuit, delighting in the feeling of it against his skin. He glances at Keats, who’s looking a bit lost, and says, “Go wild, K. How about that dress? It’s pretty short, so you should be able to fit in it just fine. And, uh, get that cloak thing, too.” 

Keats looks a bit uncertain still, but goes over to the dress. Lydia and Edward break into giggles when they see each other.

“You look ridiculous,” Lydia says.

“You look like a unicorn shit on you.” 

“Oh? You look like a sunburn became a person.”

“You look like you got mugged by fantasy Lisa Frank.”

“You look like a bad advertisement for condiments.”

“You look amazing,” Keats breathes, and they look over and see him with stars in his eyes. He fidgets awkwardly when they see him in his dress, doing an experimental twirl and throwing his arms into the air, like ‘tada’, which throws him off balance a bit, but he stays upright.

“Thanks, shortstack,” Lydia says with a genuine smile. “You look pretty damn rad yourself.”

“I think he’s got the right idea,” Edward says, doing his own arms-in-air pose. “They’re doing a show, right? We should give ‘em all a preview. We have an audience here, right?” He gestures exaggeratedly at the mannequins, and Keats laughs when he suddenly breaks into an equally exaggerated strut, stopping at the end of the room in a ridiculous pose.

“Nice.” Lydia does her own pose-then-strut-then-pose, and they strut around together for Keats for a while as he claps, then they get him to do his own show, then they all sort of walk around together in a caricature of what they think a fashion show would be like. 

They change their clothes now and then, trying on new things and new combinations, posing all over the place and collapsing in laughter at the results. It’s not too long before it’s been an hour, and before Edward admits reluctantly they should probably get going before they risk someone coming back.

Back into their normal, much dirtier, much rougher clothes, Keats sighs, running a hand along a velvet skirt. “This sucks,” he murmurs. “I like these ones.”

Lydia and Edward exchange glances again.

“I could learn to sew,” Edward offers. “I’m good with my hands.” 

“I can draw them,” Lydia says, looking at her nails. “Shouldn’t be too hard, and I have charcoal and shit.” 

“Yeah?” Keats asks, eyes shimmering with hope, and they’d do anything to keep that there. 

“Yeah,” Lydia confirms, nodding. “We’re going to be the best-dressed mongrels on this street, kiddo.” 

Keats runs forward without warning to hug them both, and in unison, they lean down to wrap their arms around him too.

It’s a feeling they will miss but not forget, years later, looking at a spot out in the middle of the Felicity Wilds, and when they shift their forms to look like the elves they once were, neither of them are surprised to see Edward in an ostentatious gold and red pantsuit, or Lydia in a sparkly pink bodysuit.

“Predictable,” she says.

“Dick,” he says.

“Mm,” she says, and they both look at the spot where Keats was once. “You know, I still haven’t forgiven them for taking him.” He had gotten sick because a shopkeeper had started poisoning the food in his dumpster, and Lydia and Edward hadn’t caught it fast enough. Necromancy hadn’t fixed it, either, even being a lich hadn’t fixed it. They had tried everything, but all these years later, they knew he was definitely gone. Someplace happier, hopefully. 

“Yeah, me either.” Edward’s face stretches into an unnaturally wide grin. It’s a construct; he can do that. “Guess we’ll just have to make them _suffer._ ”

“Guess so,” Lydia says, face echoing the eerie grin. “Let’s fucking do it.”

Being a lich takes a lot of things from you. But Lydia and Edward have been liches long enough that they also know another truth: being a lich also allows you to _take right back,_ too.

Hand in hand, they raise Wonderland from nothing, and they wait for people to come. They know it’ll happen eventually. People love a show, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! my tumblr is at [anuninterestingperson](http://anuninterestingperson.tumblr.com) if you wanna head over there for whatever reason. also, check out [eden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToTillAGarden/pseuds/ToTillAGarden)'s ao3; she's a tremendously talented writer and amazing person!


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